Fashion

What to know about wedding photography?

It was never easier to make good photos, but know the meaning behind the photo is more important than just making a good picture. Making a beautiful story line that will represent a couple is an art only great photographers can make. There are a lot of tricks you can use related to photo shooting and a lot of them you can learn online.

Weddings are very different than jobs with models and commercials. It has a deeper meaning, and you have to get to know the couple before starting to work. Because your name is your brand, you need to understand how important is for every job to be perfect. Sometimes it can be chaotic, but a wedding is a perfect place where you can also get experience.

Don’t rush into it

There are many bad advice you can find online and on YouTube where they say that you should just start shooting weddings if you haven’t done it before because you will gain a lot of experience. They say you will able to shoot products, you could get knowledge in how to shoot portraits, and you will be able to do event photography and all that in one day.

That is a terrible advice because you are risking or playing with somebody’s most important day in life so you can get some experience. If you mess up, you could potentially ruin this person’s day or ruin their memories because they have no photos to remember it by. Another reason why that is bad is that your name is on the line as a photographer.

If you want to get experience in that way, you should ask another photographer is there a chance you can assist them at one of their weddings. And there is a difference between assisting and second shooting. Assisting means that you accompany the main photographer by carrying their bags, move their light stands and similar things. A second shooting means that you are just as important as the main photographer.

You really need to invest in the gear that you need to shoot weddings and if you can’t afford it, rent it. Photography can be very expensive job and get very quickly more expensive especially if you have gear acquisition syndrome which every photographer has. So, renting is what every pro recommends.

For a wedding, it is recommended to have a full range of focal length, so that you have something for every situation. So, you want something wide, something mid-range and something telephoto. There are a lot of pros shooting on prime lenses on a wedding day, something like a 50mm 1.2 lens. But that isn’t always a good way to go. If you work fast, you should shoot with zoom lenses. Click here to read more.

Location scouting

Some times on a wedding day, it depends on how strict the bride and groom are, the schedule can go completely haywire and you will have no time to do any location scouting. So, it is important to arrive early and do location scouting on your own. Walk around the venue and visualize where would be best for certain types of photos. Where you would shoot the rings, where you do the couple shoots are some things you should have a location for.

It is important because when the day comes you won’t get put on the spot and surprised when you need to find a location in a few seconds. You will have them in the back of your mind that you can refer to and tell them about your ideas. You can even go to the venue a few days before the wedding to scout it out in your own time so that there is no rush at all and no pressure.

You maybe thing that you know every detail about your camera, but you should know that wedding is the worst place you can find out that that isn’t true. When you are put in a high-pressure situation like a wedding day, you can realize very quickly that you don’t know your camera as well as you thought you did.

You have to be prepared to look at a scene and know in the back of your mind what settings need to be set to expose correctly for that scene. And you need to be able to change those settings very quickly if you move into a different scene.

For example, if you are shooting a bride and groom inside of the chapel and as they are walking out, they walk out to the bright sunlight and immediately you have to change your settings. So, you have to know how to expose, for that dark scene, and as you come out, to know exactly what you are going to change so that you can expose for the brighter scene outside. Read more on this link.

There are a few different things you can do to improve the speed at which you take photos. You can give yourself a time limit. You can do this at home and set up a specific scene that you want to shoot and give yourself a time limit to capture everything in that scene with a few different focal lengths. You should give yourself one or two minutes for these tasks. Also a great idea is to do this with someone, so there is more pressure.